Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

Mass hysteria arguably belongs on the list of Bad Things, but I don't think it is as likely to knock out your internet or power supply for a prolonged period. Maybe more of a reason for a Toilet Roll Resiliency Club.

GCP went down over a null pointer exception recently, taking down a good chunk of sites, and people claimed that it was the start of WW3, since obviously it would begin with an internet blackout - Meanwhile everyone is refreshing their feeds constantly to see the latest hypersonic missiles hit civilian houses in HD quality."war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria. People just write buggy software

If they do, they should also read commentary: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/25227/what-...

I remember bank run being one of the reasons why SVB failed, and also during the COVID pandemic people rushing to buy toilet paper has a terrible effect on the market.

However I don't think these cases are anywhere close to the level of widespread disruption that the list of dangers can bring.

Do you happen to know instances where mass hysteria had a similar effect on disrupting global supply chains or communication services than war, geopolitics etc?

> "war, geopolitics and climate change" seems like the same kind of paranoid hysteria

It is until it isn't. Better not to write off these dangers and to just focus on keeping the general public in the dark to avoid mass hysteria, and treat these other threats with the required respect they deserve just in case.

Mass Hysteria is seriously dangerous. A few years ago I've seen a full room of people applauding Military for ordering more tanks. ("Enough to have those shot down by Russia in the calculation"). And young German politicians being proud of it. They even said publicly "The best outcome of the Ukraine War would be reinstallment of the old German-Russian border."

Germany has the potential to go full Nazi again... And the population is mostly crazy in a scary way "We need sirens", "We need bunkers", "How can I make my pupils go for a career in the army"...

Instead of of investing time into making a mesh network. I'd like to see more energy spent on preventing real dangers. If people don't start going against the real troublemakers, loss of internet will be very low on the list of problems of the future.

And still nobody I've ever seen in public speak or comment about climate has ever read any paper on atmosphere physics... Before you build a mesh network against climate change, people should better read at least a few papers about atmosphere physics first.

If you look more, you'll most likely find more discussions. The things on StackExchange are a bit lame. There was a blog somewhere that posted about climate data for about a decade and had a discussion going on for maybe 2 months... I don't know if can find that again. Soon after the discussion of that paper the blog was pretty dead...

you're suggesting that the internet makes well-spread rumours less likely?

I tried to parse it by reading the intro and the conclusion. Is it trying to say some of the heating effects will be potentially saturated and limited when co2 increases, decreasing temperature? York and Princeton seem legit but don't know about how well received this is

At the beginning of COVID many countries had toilet paper shortages because of mass hysteria. Now imagine how ugly things would get if there wasn't enough food to go around. It's not that far fetched if there's a supply chain disruption. There's no secret food reserves at supermarkets, they sell products just-in-time.

Please explain yourself, downvoters!

They're saying "The effects of the first ton of CO2 dumped into the atmosphere is much higher than the effects of the next ton. Now there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that dumping any more into it will have a negligible effect."

The implication is "There's no need to worry about CO2 at this point, it's already done the damage it can, so let's call our global warming concerns off". But the models may be suspect (see my other post), so I wouldn't go celebrate just yet. Let's at least wait for peer review or submission to a notable journal to see how well received it is.

The essence is that each frequency alone is eventually saturated. (can't absorb more than everything). If you add more CO2 you'll start to absorb more in new frequencies, but the effect is getting smaller. To calculate how much the numbers add up, there is HITRAN-Database with a lot of data about the absorption lines.

About these calculations there's interesting material out there. I think there's even software to download, and feed with a download of HITRAN-Data.

A bank run started by our esteemed VC brethren having a mass panic attack, then getting their own money out, then telling people they had a financial stake in to get their money out, et voila your bank is now running.

Commenting on voting is against the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). To understand why your comment fares as it does, helps to re-read the guidelines in their entirety.

I know why my comment was downvoted, and I know what the guidelines are. I wanted to know why people were downvoting adornKey's completely reasonable comment.